MICHAEL MOORE: Hey, Bernie. It's Michael Moore. And I'd like for you to just explain to people the basic things that... what's wrong with American capitalism these days.
SEN. SANDERS: Michael, thanks very much for that very important and profound question. To do that question justice would take a lot more time than what we have today, but let me just say a few things.
Capitalism does a lot of things well... It creates wealth, it sparks entrepreneurial spirit, and that's great. But on the other hand, what we have had, especially since the Reagan administration, is an unfettered cowboy-type capitalism which has ended up with the shrinking and decline of the middle class, a very significant increase in poverty, and the reality that the people on top, the top one percent or two percent, are making out like bandits.
The top one percent earns more income than the bottom 50 percent. That is to my mind immoral. And from an economic perspective, it is not good. You have CEOs of top corporations making 400 times more than their workers. I'd like somebody to explain to me how that makes any sense - both from a moral and an economic perspective.
The United States today has the highest rate of childhood poverty. We are the only nation in the industrialized world that doesn't guarantee health care to all of its people. When kids go to college in America, they often come out twenty, thirty, forty thousand dollars in debt. I think all of that is wrong, and I think as a nation, we can do better than that.
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